A study of the effects of trend, variability, frequency, and form of data on teachers' judgments about progress and...

Past research has demonstrated the influence of various factors on teachers' judgments about their students' progress. When graphed data are viewed, teachers tend to make different decisions depending upon the amount of data viewed and its trend. Current surveys of teachers' practices in data collection and decision-making indicate that teachers primarily collect training data which are examined in both graphed and ungraphed (response by response) forms to make weekly decisions about progress. In this study, 56 teachers of students with moderate to profound disabilities viewed task analytic data in one of three forms: graphed, ungraphed, or both forms. Teachers were asked to describe the progress and make a program recommendation for each student whose data they examined. Three repeated factors (trend, variability, and frequency of data collection) also were examined for their effect on the dependent variables and their interactions with data form and with each other. Results were in agreement with earlier research and further indicated that the form of the data did not produce different judgments or decisions. However, the three factors, trend, variability, and the frequency of data collection, all had significant main effects with teachers' descriptions about student progress and their program recommendations; several significant interactions among the factors also were found.